I have written a book about adapting to climate change coming out in August 2025 with Bloomsbury: Sink or Swim: how the world needs to adapt to a changing climate.

I make the case that adaptation so far has not gone far or fast enough, and there are a set of hard policy and political choices coming up around how best to adapt in a world of 1.5 degrees warming and beyond.

Choices such as how to support communities to relocate away from coastlines, how to fairly account for moving fish stocks, how to make the food system and global trade more resilient whilst also increasing productivity, and what role the military should play in adaptation.

These hard choices will require political debates and new solutions to create a liveable world in the next century and beyond.

Will we sink or swim?

Reviews:

‘A crucial roadmap for turning climate paralysis into action, brilliantly outlining how climate adaptation must happen with people, not for people’

Christiana Figueres, author of The Future we Choose, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

"In the best of all possible worlds, we would have prevented dramatic climate change by a fast transition to clean energy. But this is not that world--and this book is therefore a truly important contribution to the emerging understanding that we also have to adapt to the fact that many of us won't be able to live or farm in the places where we now live. If we don't make hard choices, the planet will make them for us."

Bill McKibben, author Here Comes the Sun

'If you only read one book about climate adaptation, Sink or Swim should be it. Susannah Fisher takes us to the heart of the hard choices we now face about how to adapt to climate crisis, from managing people on the move, to how we grow food, sustain nature and avoid conflict. An impassioned but grounded and highly accessible account of the science, politics and ethics of trying to protect life on a rapidly warming planet.'

Professor Peter Newell, author of Power Shift